Think of non‐ essential relative clauses as adjectives describing the noun; you can remove adjectives without changing the meaning of the sentence. A relative clause can be introduced by either a ...

An adverbial can be any word, phrase or clause that modifies either a verb, an adjective or a complete sentence to convey this information. In other words, adverbials aren’t necessarily adverbs.

Write with nouns and verbs, not with adjectives and adverbs,' they insist. ... And then, in the very next sentence, comes a negative passive clause containing three adjectives: 'The adjective hasn ...

Nouns are often modified by other nouns, by prepositional phrases, and in other ways that don’t involve adjectives; and verbs are often modified by prepositional phrases, subordinate clauses ...

When you want to know whether a word is an adverb, check a dictionary, skimming all its entries for each part of speech — noun, adjective, adverb — that applies. Adverbs can modify whole ...

This raises a larger question: When is it acceptable to use adjectives after action verbs? Most of us know that certain state-of-being verbs, such as “appear,” “smell,” “seem,” “beco ...

This is the concluding part of the Forum’s recent retrospective of my 2018 series on reducing adjective clauses to adjective phrases, which drew this rejoinder last October 26 from Forum member Miss ...

These two questions can’t be easily answered because they require a clear understanding of the structure of complex sentences and of the whittling down process in English grammar known as “reduction ...